Business-focused legal analysis and insight in the most significant jurisdictions worldwide

Niklas JRM Schmidt

Dr Niklas JRM Schmidt, TEP, is a partner at Wolf Theiss, the largest Austrian law firm. He has been admitted as a lawyer and as a tax adviser. His areas of specialisation include tax law and private clients. Mr Schmidt is frequently engaged as a speaker at tax conferences and has been a visiting lecturer at various universities. Currently, he is a member of the examination commission for the certified financial planner exam in Austria, and he sits on the editorial board of the SteuerExpress magazine. Furthermore, Mr Schmidt is a member of the International Fiscal Association, the International Bar Association, the International Tax Planning Association and the Society of Trust and Estate Practitioners. He has been named one of Austria’s top 10 tax lawyers in the Austrian magazine TREND and is ranked in tier 1 by many international legal directories.

Since the financial crisis in 2008, there has been continuous public attention on multinationals' tax position - which, for the most part, turns on their transfer pricing policy and whether this properly aligns the taxable profits in each country with the value-generating activities taking place there.

At a macro level, the dominant trend affecting the private wealth arena in the last 12 months continues to be the impact of various supranational initiatives seeking greater transparency with respect to anti-money laundering regimes and tax information exchange. I propose to focus in this year’s introduction on the central importance of the concept of ‘beneficial ownership’ and the theme of convergence in the increasingly interconnected arenas of anti-money laundering policy and tax information exchange.

The drive towards greater tax transparency has continued in 2017. The trend is driven by pressure on tax authorities to raise more revenue and increasing public disquiet about the well-publicised practices of some large multinationals and wealthy individuals, who apparently pay a disproportionately small sum in tax compared to the man in the street.